As a low-income freelancer with mostly very old Apple gear, my whole tech situation is a right nightmare. I intend to start documenting this dystopian experience here on my blog. Today the issue is connecting devices such as my iPhone(s), iPad, or other peripherals, and transferring stuff like photos, music, and so on.
There was a time when it was quite easy. Just plug ‘n’ go, more or less. But it hasn’t been that way for ages now. Partly thanks, I think, to the whole iCloud thang. I’m not that keen on iCloud. It’s potentially a good idea. But, as usual with Apple, they’re way too limited and prescriptive in how it works.
I’m sure the features i’d like would be a piece of the proverbial pisces to implement. Why son’t they make such features available? I can only guess that it must have something to do with control/money: it seems Apple want you to do everything their way, preferably – for them – via subscription service. And I ain’t goin’ that way!
Just one example of this, and how it relates to iCloud, would be the ability to select, for every entry one makes, where calendar data will appear of be shared. So, for example, I might be happy that some calendar info is up on the iCloud, but I may prefer other data remains purely ‘local’, to my devices. Butt, to my knowledge, this is not, never has been, and looks unlikely to ever be, a feature. Bummer!
Anyway, moving on to the issues that I’m dealing with – or rather facing, as I don’t appear to be getting anywhere in the dealing with sense – today, these are: transferring photos and videos from mobile devices to the back-up/core libraries I try and maintain on my main iMac centred network. Both ‘libraries; are in fact on an external hard-drive.
Oh, and yet another recurring bugbear, just to interject, is the way that when I try and set up or control my imports, shit happens that I appear to have no control over. For example, changing the setting on my iPhone 6S so as to allow me to put any music on it, and specifying that I DO NOT want to auto-sync with my default iTunes library (which for starters is waaay too big, and secondly, despite being repeatedly set as the default library is never auto-located when I launch iTunes, but has to be found and ‘selected’)
On selecting this option in preferences, iTunes proceeds to dick about with the content on my iPhone, such that stuff that was there before that I had painstakingly removed, has reappeared, whilst stuff I’ve added, disappears. And then, to top it all off, it appears to hang mid transfer, with large swathes of content greyed out, and the little progress icons stuck in a frozen greyed-out inactivity. FFS!!!